Thoughtexp
Noteworthy contributions have been made exploring the importance of thought experiments in disciplines other than mathematics, philosophy, or physics. They include history (Tetlock et al. (eds.), 2009, pp. 14–44; Rescher, 2003, pp. 238–238, and 2005, pp. 36–46; Reiss, 2009; Weber; De Mey, 2003), the social sciences (Aligica and Evans, 2009; Belkin; Tetlock (eds.), 1996; Reiss, 2013; Roberts, 1993; Schabas, 2008; Ylikoski, 2003), and Christian theology (Fehige, 2009, 2011b, 2012, 2013, and forthcoming). An interesting, but relatively unexplored issue concerns the relative importance of thought experiments in different disciplines. Physics and philosophy use them extensively. Chemistry, by contrast, has none of note at all. Why is this the case? Perhaps it is merely an historical accident that chemists never developed a culture of doing thought experiments. Perhaps it is tied to some deep feature of the discipline itself (see Snooks, 2006). Economics and history use thought experiments, but apparently not anthropology. A good explanation would likely tell us a lot about the structure of the discipline itself. Since the interest in simulation is growing among philosophers of science, the relationship between computer simulation and thought experiments has started to attract attention (see Behmel, 2001, pp. 98–108; Di Paolo et al., 2000; El Skaf and Imbert, 2013; Lenhard 2011; Stäudner, 1998). The issue here is whether computer simulations are thought experiments. This is rather unlikely (contrary to Beisbart, 2012) because thought experiments and computer simulations seem to involve different kinds of simulation and have different aims. Still, their relationship is certainly of interest to anyone working on thought experiments, especially if it is true that computer simulations are the new way of doing science that is on a par with science by classical real world experiments (see Morrison, 2009). Accordingly, it has been argued that “computational modeling is largely replacing thought experimenting, and the latter will play only a limited role in future practice of science, especially in the sciences of complex nonlinear, dynamical phenomena” (see Chandrasekharan et al., 2012, p. 239). Maybe related to this is the proposal of Schulzke (2014) to think of video games philosophically as executable thought experiments. Tentative steps have been undertaken to relate more general epistemological topics to the primary challenge of thought experiments. As we have seen, this is true for intuitions. Noteworthy is the discussion surrounding the metaphilosophical views of Timothy Williamson (see Malmgren, 2011). To name another example: Conceivability and Possibility (edited by T. S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, Oxford: Oxford University Press) includes a number of contributions that note the relevance of the discussed topic to thought experiments. According to Bealer, thought experiments seem to involve a conceivability that is too weak to provide reliable modal information because they only exploit “physical intuitions” (p. 74). David Chalmers thinks that good thought experiments can be a guide to possibilities if the entailments of conceivability and possibility that he defends are sound (p. 153). Alan Sidelle's discussion of the metaphysical contingency of the laws of nature explicitly refers to the “importance of traditional imagining, conceiving, and thought experiment to modal inquiry” (p. 310), and can be read as a challenge to any claim that thought experiments would reveal anything more than a “necessity based in analyticity” (p. 329). To be welcomed is the entry of phenomenology into the discussion on thought experiments (see Hopp, 2014). More exchange between phenomenology and analytic philosophy seems desirable, especially regarding the role of the body in thought experiments (see Fehige and Wiltsche, 2013). Finally, Kertesz (forthcoming) links conceptual metaphor research to the puzzle thought experiments pose in that they can facilitate knowledge acquisition, and argues that the former provides resources to solve the latter